2nd Watch Survey: Most Enterprises Are Still DevOps Dreaming

Despite the fact that many companies have begun moving to more DevOps-type processes and adopting tools that fit into a DevOps framework, nearly eight in 10 respondents said their organizations continue to have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development, demonstrating that enterprises have a long way to go in their DevOps transition.

SEATTLE, June 14, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 2nd Watch announces the results of a survey regarding the adoption and “completeness of vision” around DevOps. More than 1,000 IT professionals, all of whom were either managers or directors in companies of at least 1,000 employees, participated in the survey, which ran online in April. A key takeaway was that the vast majority of companies haven’t fully committed to the DevOps process.

2nd Watch defines DevOps as the practice of operations and development engineers working together within a common service lifecycle, from application design through development and into production and support. This “completeness of vision” includes, but is not limited to, the tools that the development and operations teams use, and their methodologies. “In order to transform a business into a DevOps organization, companies should work towards bringing separate operating groups together as a single team,” says Jeff Aden, EVP of Marketing and Business Development at 2nd Watch.

Evidence to support the theory that organizations haven’t fully embraced DevOps can be found in the survey results. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said that separate teams are still managing infrastructure/operations and application development. Some organizations surveyed by 2nd Watch are using infrastructure-as-code tools, automation or even CI/CD pipelines, but those techniques alone do not define DevOps.

To wit, 2nd Watch asked survey participants, “How is your infrastructure deployed and managed?” While nearly 60% replied that they are using infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g. Terraform, Configuration Management, Kubernetes), 38% responded that they are managing infrastructure manually, which means not only are they not practicing DevOps, they aren’t managing infrastructure in a way that will ever be compatible with DevOps.

Aside from infrastructure, 2nd Watch posed several questions around application development and deployment as it pertains to DevOps. Testing code appears to be an area where a majority of respondents are staying proactive in a way that would be beneficial to a DevOps practice. When asked, “What is your approach to writing tests?,” almost 75% of respondents said they are doing some form of consistent testing. Disappointingly, 25% of respondents have little or no testing of code in place at all.

On a related topic, 2nd Watch asked, “How is application code deployed and managed?” Around 30% of respondents indicated they are using a manual process for deployment, and the remaining 70% are using some form of an automated pipeline. While the 70% figure is a positive sign for companies that want to embrace DevOps, the remaining 30% will have to build-out automation around testing, building and deploying code.

Another important factor in managing services the DevOps way is for an IT organization to have all of its environments “mirror” each other. In response to the question, “How well do your environments (e.g. development, test, production) mirror one another?,” approximately 28% of respondents indicated that their environments are managed completely independent of one another. Another 47% indicated that they “share some portion of code but are not managed through identical code bases and processes,” and the remaining 25% are managing identically, using the same code and processes.

In a final attempt to discern the degree of DevOps adoption in the enterprise, 2nd Watch asked, “How are you notified when an application/process/system fails?” Over 21% of respondents indicated they are notified of outages by the end user – a surprisingly high percentage for large companies. Another 32% responded that “someone in operations is watching a dashboard,” which isn’t as surprising but still not ideal for a DevOps approach. Twenty-three percent said they are using third-party tools like New Relic and Pingdom to monitor their apps, and approximately 25% said, “Monitoring is built into the pipeline, apps and infrastructure. Notifications are sent immediately.” These companies are definitely on the right path to practicing DevOps today, if they aren’t there already.

“The results reveal the 80/20 rule, where slightly more than 20% of respondents are actually engaging in DevOps in its purest form today,” says Aden. “There is still a tremendous opportunity for companies to modernize their organizations to accelerate development and remain competitive in the marketplace.”

About 2nd Watch

2nd Watch is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and a Microsoft Azure Silver Partner, providing managed cloud to enterprises. The company’s subject matter experts, software-enabled services and cutting-edge solutions provide companies with tested, proven, and trusted solutions, allowing them to fully leverage the power of the cloud. 2nd Watch solutions are high performing, robust, increase operational excellence, decrease time to market, accelerate growth and lower risk. Its patent-pending, proprietary tools automate everyday workload management processes for big data analytics, digital marketing, line-of-business and cloud native workloads. 2nd Watch is a new breed of business which helps enterprises design, deploy and manage cloud solutions and monitors business critical workloads 24x7. 2nd Watch has more than 400 enterprise workloads under its management and more than 200,000 instances in its managed public cloud. The venture-backed company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. To learn more about 2nd Watch, visit www.2ndwatch.com or call 888-317-7920.

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